Titan recently released a new iteration of its upmarket Stellar line. The Stellar 3.0 features some impressive under-the-hood work in its limited-edition models. These include an in-house wandering-hours complication — in which traditional hands are replaced with a rotating satellite mechanism — Grade 5 titanium cases, another first for the brand, and some striking dials. Prices, reflective of Titan’s premium push, range between ₹96,000 and ₹1.8 lakh. “Sales of our automatics are doubling year-on-year,” said Kuruvilla Markose, the newly appointed CEO of Titan’s watches division.
The Stellar line is barely two years old, but towards the end of September, the company unveiled the latest iteration of the Edge, among the most recognisable of the 19 million watches, including smartwatches, it sells every year. (For the record, that’s more than the entire Swiss watch industry combined.)
The new Ultra Slim ( ₹75,000) uses one of the world’s thinnest quartz movements and features a floating-disc hand just 160 microns thin — thinner than two human hairs — that displays time in ten-minute intervals. “It took us about three years to shave off half a millimetre,” said Markose. At 3.3 mm, the Ultra Slim is the thinnest Edge ever, down 0.2 mm from the original launched in 2002. But Titan is not the only watchmaker to inhabit this exacting zone and stay invested in it. Over the years, and especially in the last decade, several watchmakers have routinely knocked each other off the summit of Mount Slimmest.
The battle for thinness
Thin watches are not new. Brands such as Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Piaget and Bulgari have been shedding both pounds and miniaturising components for decades. But it was really in the 2010s that the contest was rekindled. Piaget’s 3.65 mm Altiplano 900P, once the world’s thinnest mechanical watch, set the early benchmarks, only to be overtaken by Bulgari, which turned its Octo Finissimo into a recurring feat of engineering, each successive model slicing microns off the last. Titan joined that league in 2021 with the 5.85 mm-thin Edge Mechanical. The limited-edition watch, priced at ₹1.95 lakh, was powered by the 2.2 mm Edge Calibre 903, with a power reserve of 42 hours.
Three years ago, Swiss luxury watchmaker Richard Mille, beloved of Indian cricketers and film stars, launched the RM UP-01. At 1.75 mm, the 30-gram watch featured a case thinner than its own strap. Today, the world’s thinnest mechanical watch is Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo Ultra COSC, a mere 1.70 mm thick, achieved through a monobloc case-back movement that virtually erases the line between movement and casing.
Breaking point
A similar battle played out in the 1970s and ’80s, as quartz technology both bloomed and boomed. Japanese brands such as Seiko and Citizen and, in response, Longines and Concord (now owned by Movado) produced wafer-thin cases to showcase their mastery of micro-engineering. Concord’s Delirium series featured watches just about a millimetre thick, and the era birthed firms specialising in ultra-thin movements such as Jean Lassale, which was later purchased by Seiko. When Titan introduced the Edge in 2002, it was, in spirit, a continuation of that same lineage.
There were times, of course, when this whole quest for ultra-thinness appeared comical and self-indulgent. The 0.98 mm-thin Concord Delirium IV couldn’t really be worn for fear that the case would bend when strapped to the wrist, and the ₹4.5 crore Octo Finissimo Ultra COSC is supposed to be wearable — but with caveats. It’s precisely the sort of territory that Titan wants to avoid. “The Edge Mechanical was a showcase of what we could do,” says Markose, “but our goal is to make watches that are both practical and wearable.”
The Future of the Edge
While some enthusiasts might have liked to see the Edge evolve in a more mechanical direction, Titan’s roadmap points elsewhere: towards accuracy and efficiency. Markose says the company intends to keep pushing the limits of precision and thinness through quartz innovation, an area he believes still holds untapped potential.
In the wider watch world, this pursuit of ultra-precise quartz — often called high-accuracy quartz or super quartz — has its own niche but devoted following. The majority of quartz watches oscillate at 32,768 Hz, the standard frequency for quartz timekeeping, but HAQ movements achieve extraordinary precision through thermocompensation and meticulous regulation. By adjusting for temperature changes and crystal ageing, they can maintain stability within a few seconds a year, far beyond what even the most refined mechanical calibres can manage.
Over the years, Grand Seiko’s 9F (±10 seconds a year) and Breitling’s SuperQuartz (roughly the same) have defined the high end of this segment. The current accuracy champion is Citizen’s Caliber 0100, the most precise commercially produced watch ever made, is rated at ±1 second per year. The watch’s super high frequency oscillator runs at a mind-boggling 8,388,608 Hz.
Closer home, Titan is now exploring its own path to greater efficiency and precision. Much of its current R&D, Markose explains, centres on micro-motors, individual motors that power separate modules instead of relying on a single shared drive. “We are working on something we internally call synchronised analogue micro-motors,” he says, likening the system to an orchestra where each section performs independently but in harmony. This isn’t a traditional thermocompensated HAQ movement, but Titan’s own engineering route towards the same goal of greater stability, accuracy, and design flexibility.
For the Edge, this could mark a quiet evolution: from the thinnest watch Titan could build to the most precise it can make. “The idea,” says Markose, “is to keep pushing the envelope — with new materials, micro-motors, and precision engineering — but without losing sight of the wearer. We have many irons in the fire.”
